Ming explains contrastive element commands, a technique to test if speech-delayed children truly understand sentences or just pick up on context clues. Instead of stepwise instructions, use commands with two key words like "put the orange on the plate" and vary the setting to see if they grasp the actual meaning.
In the speech therapy industry, we have something called a contrastive element command. And what it is is actually just sentence comprehension, basically. Some practices I see can come in two ways. There's a stepwise command. First do this and then do this. And then there's the contrastive command, which in a sentence, there are two keywords or pieces of information that are very important. You don't have to understand the sentence as a whole, but if you get those two keywords, you're able to do the action. For instance, the sentence would be put the orange on the plate. All the child has to listen is orange and plate, and they will know what to do. Are they able to take out the keywords? You can check like that. Another way to check this is you can ask for a child to do the same thing, but change the words on a daily basis. For instance, if you give them a piece of rubbish and you say, put it on the sofa, what are they going to do? Probably they're going to throw it in the bin, right? If they look at you weird, then this kid can understand what I'm saying. So you have to use these decontextualized commands.
